Modern technology has provided users with seemingly innumerable means of communicating with each other, such as smartphones, tablet PCs, telephones, video phones, teleconferencing equipment, text messaging, instant messaging, social networking, and the like.
At the same time, advertisers are leveraging these channels of communication to deliver an ever increasing number of advertisements to users. This overabundance of advertisement often irritates users, and one of the most obnoxious forms is unsolicited telemarketing phone calls and automated marketing phone calls (“robocalls”) and text messages. Sometimes the communications are actually fraudulent, and users inadvertently give valuable financial or identification information away to criminals.